A memoir of growing up amid poverty in contemporary urban China—at once lyrical and brutal. It is 1980 and Hong Ying has turned 18. China is only now hesitantly beginning to move from under the powerful and dreadful shadow of the now dead Mao Zedong. Hong Ying is only now hesitantly beginning to reach adulthood, exploring her own mind, her sexuality, her past. Born in the famine year of 1962, Hong Ying’s determined to uncover the secrets that lie beneath the surface of her family, to understand why she feels like an outsider in their midst. At the same time she becomes involved with a history teacher at her high school who has his own shadowy and violent past that will soon lead him to a tragic end. He emboldens her to think for herself and also briefly becomes her lover. Throughout it all, the lives of Hong Ying and those around her are hopelessly enmeshed in the capricious and catastrophic policies of the Chinese Communist Party. The famine years of the early “60s, brought on by inept government policies, led her mother, Hong Ying learns, to make choices she would not otherwise have made. The factious struggles of the Cultural Revolution led the history teacher to commit acts of brutality very much against his nature. This is, then, the story of one person’s awakening, but also of a society’s. In its stark and detailed portrayal of unremitting poverty—the pervasive sense of hopelessness and casual violence—and of the stress and intimacies of family life, the work is reminiscent of Angela’s Ashes. Yet it is also very much a part of the great realist writing tradition of China’s “May 4th” movement of the 1930s (Lu Xun, Lao She, etc.) in which the greater tragedies of society are revealed in the ruined lives of a few characters. A major writer emerges here, combining flawlessly the often broken dreams of youth and the usually broken dream of politics. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1637-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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